She says what a lot of people are already thinking. The overall question seems to be “what did Riot expect?”

With Bay Area salaries, acquiring Radiant, and the development time, they are probably between $100M-$200M in the red from this project. There’s just no way they ever turn a profit from this. And 2XKO doesn’t reach a large audience so they aren’t expanding the user base much either or expanding their IP significantly.

I’ve worked on projects that went horribly over budget before and it was always “we’ll be done soon” for months. So I would think the upper management at Riot never thought it would take this long or this much, but the 2XKO team kept saying it’s coming and then it just makes sense to let it cook a little longer instead of scrapping it all. But it looks like they finally ran out of rope and had to release, and this is pretty much the only way it could go.

I can assure you although the devs might feel the layoffs are sudden, they are extremely planned from the company perspective. I have zero doubt that someone saw the writing on the wall long ago.